January 4, 2009

• Home Security

  So this weekend my wife and I were hanging out with our best friend at Dicks when we began looking at their gun selection.  The reason is because my friend has two guns already and has been  trying to convince me to buy one.  Also my wife wants a gun for home defense.  The reason she wants one is because her dad is friends with many cops and he has told her all the horror stories that his cop friends passed down to him.  She is naturally very fearful of an intruder breaking in to our place.  She is only five foot two inches as well so her small build makes her more fearful and thus it is something I have been willing to discuss with her.  We have gone over the pros and cons of it as well as try and figure out what would work best.  We had some ideas and figured this excursion to Dicks would be a good opportunity to learn more.  We spoke with the sales associate there who fought in the military, and has shot intruders for home defense as well.  He gave us a lot of good advice such as that if you point a gun at someone you better be ready to pull that trigger.  It is not for intimidation.  If you just want to intimidate the intruder then get a big dog and a baseball bat.  He has a good point about this.  If you point a gun at an intruder he is more likely take his weapon out on you rather than run.  The sales associate also explained that a shotgun is better to have than a handgun.  The reason being is that if someone wakes you up in the middle of the night, it’s dark, your groggy and possibly shaking through a jolt of fear and adrenaline, you are going to have trouble aiming and pointing a gun.  A shotgun is more likely to hit the intruder because of the spray of pellets that come out of it.  Our friend was very convinced and did want a weapon for home protection so he bought the Stoeger P350 home defense shotgun.  I was intrigued to learn more and wanted to feel what it was like to fire the assortment of weapons my friend had so he said he would take me to the shooting range the next day.  Well this morning we went out and we shot the shotgun, his 9mm handgun, and his .22 caliber rifle.  I was impressed.  The shotgun even from a distance of 50 feet had quite the spray pattern.  I was able to fire “accurately” at the paper we had up and did see the spray of pellets that hit the paper.  I put accurately in quotations because with a shotgun you are just shooting at a general direction while pellets fly everywhere.  It was quite convincing.  I then tried the 9mm handgun from a short distance of 7 feet ( or yards I cannot remember anymore ) and found it was much harder to be accurate with it.  The kick back on it would throw me off my target.  I was able to hit the paper but not always close to the center bullseye mark.  We fired about 60 rounds out of that and then moved on to the rifle.  Now with the scope on I was able to fire that very accuratley from most distances.  We started at 25 and moved it as far out as 100.  The problem with that though is two fold.  One is that I was using a scope and the original purpose of this trip was to find a suitable weapon that my wife and I can use for home defense.  The other problem was that the rifle was a small caliber gun so it would not do enough damage to a home intruder to stop him.  I was impressed with the shotgun the most in the end though and we will be taking my wife with us next weekend to see how she handles the kickback of the shotgun on her shoulder.  I had no problem with it but am a much stronger and larger person than she is. 

  I found it all very enlightening and while the thought of owning a gun is very much on my mind now I am still not sure about the use of one for home defense.  Anyone else have any thoughts or ideas about this?

  • 8:44 pm
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